In defiance of increasingly unhinged threats from the US government Nicaraguans gave Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas a decisive first round election win in Nicaragua today. The Americans pulled out all the stops including threatening trade, aid and even individual remittances to the tiny Central American country.America punished Nicaraguans throughout the 80's for daring to vote for leftists with a terrorist campaign that ended up costing 30,000 lives. Nicaraguans gave in and let successive American supported conservative governments run the country in line with the Washington consensus of unrestricted trade, selling off the public sector and 'free trade zones', sweat shop camps where even limited labour laws were non-existent and no taxes went to the state. Result? An economy competing with Haiti for the poverty stricken bottom of the hemisphere. The people of Nicaragua finally signalled today that they'd had enough.
The Leftward tilt continues in Latin America.
2 comments:
Good news for us. Bad news for the neocons! It is also time that the world takes the US to task for its shameless interferance in the affairs of Nicaragua.
It's good in the sense that we have a left wing government in Nicaragua, but it's bad that it had to be Ortega. Ortega has been denounced by a lot of the Sandinistas who are far more respectable (intellectually speaking) then he is. That being said, democracy has spoken and I hope the people of Nicaragua are served well by their new leader.
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